theyarecomingforyou 9,089

1) This is a trade dispute and is simply a way of employing protectionist measures against Chinese imports

2) China somehow has even lower food standards than the United States

Given the shockingly low food standards in the US I consider it more likely that this is a political move rather than there being any legitimate concerns about food safety. I mean we're talking about a country that feeds growth hormones and antibiotics to cattle, uses centrifuges and harsh chemicals to extract animal tissue from bones, blends chicken carcasses into meat paste and only inspects 6% of domestic food producers / 0.4% of foreign food producers. A country where the top food safety jobs are filled by former executives and lobbyists from Monsanto and other major businesses. A country where the political right has systematically undermined regulation to the point where it is completely ineffectual.

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HawkMan 5,077

You can buy meat without antibiotics in the US. A lot of people don't care, which is why they have large medical bills.

Sure, the expensive markets that cater to the higher middle class and up may have it. or they simply don't say that it's full of anti biotics since it's pretty much in all the food given to those animals in the US.

In any case, how sick they are isn't dependant on whether they eat beef with or without anti biotics anyway. i's this massive overuse of anti biotics that's causing a surge of resistance bacteria. these bacteria don't care what meat you eat.

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hagjohn 2,135

hagjohn 2,135

Sure, the expensive markets that cater to the higher middle class and up may have it. or they simply don't say that it's full of anti biotics since it's pretty much in all the food given to those animals in the US.

From my experience, that is not true. You can find them in your local grocery store.

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+Mirumir 5,071

How the hell does it even make sense to, Send them to china and then send them BACK again! The delay in shipping time must cost business money

There are two things that need to be kept in mind to understand this:

1) When it comes to any kind of large-scale, industrial-type of production, the fundamental principle is that nothing should get wasted, because the waste can be re-sold and re-processed. One man's trash is another man's treasure.

2) The food processing industry heavily relies on the manual human labour. Despite the fact that technologies exist to automatically separate meat from bones (or blend them together), a machine cannot tell the difference between the different parts of a chicken yet if you feed it the whole trunk. A worker must separate different pieces first (because each part is valued differently) and then sort them accordingly.

So, given that:

a) the cost of labour is lower in China, and

b) the demand for the post-processed trash is greater in China =>

=> it makes for a perfect business case to do it the way it's proposed in the article as all the decisions the corporations make are profit-driven.

Finally, the savings from the manual labour in China must offset the cost of shipping it all back and forth. They must have done their homework.

Why they cant do all this in the US I do not know.

They can and they do. But the margins of doing it through China are higher and the CEO's want their bonuses for their extra work extra profit that they've showed the shareholders.

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blerk 316

blerk 316

Clever companies (like McDonalds - seriously) will see a potential consumer backlash and act accordingly. They'll simply advertise their McNuggets, etc, as 100% made in the USA (or some such variation that meets legal requirements). They'll have campaigns where they say the chicken is grown in America, killed in America and chicken-nuggetized in America.

Where I'm from (and this isn't limited to my country), McDonalds and other major food corporations put lots of effort into advertising that their food is made in-country. Various burger boxes say where the product generally comes from, for instance the Big Mac says something like 'We only use 100% pure beef sourced from farmers in places like King Country and Canterbury* to create the tastiest burgers around (*sometimes if we can't get enough, we'll use some Australian beef).'